The Devil's Playground_ A Century of Pleasure and Profit in Times Square - James Traub [83]
Klein offered the architectural commission to Philip Johnson, who he felt had “the prestigious image that was important to attract corporate tenants.” At the time, in fact, Johnson had a reputation among corporate clients that very few American architects, if any, have ever enjoyed. The headquarters he had designed for AT&T, half-affectionately known as the Chippendale Building, had become the emblematic postmodern structure and had landed him on the cover of Time magazine. And like Klein, Johnson was unambiguous about the virtues of erasure. As a young man in prewar New York, he had loved the Astor Hotel. But the Astor was gone, and now Johnson, like Klein, thought of Times Square as a place to avoid. He thought of it, really, as no place at all; he and his partner, John Burgee, felt that their role was to impart a sense of place to an urban wilderness. Times Square Center would be not merely an array of buildings but, like Rockefeller Center, a place in and of itself, an urban settlement made of office towers.
In late 1983, Johnson and Burgee unveiled their design for a suite of four buildings, varying in height and bulk but identically designed in glass with a sheath or screen of light pink granite. The buildings were topped by glass mansard roofs with iron finials—like the nearby Knickerbocker Building, Johnson pointed out, though they also bore a strong resemblance to a building he had just finished in San Francisco. The complex was a true center not only aesthetically but physically, with individual buildings linked to one another and the subway by underground passageways. Corporate tenants, like theatergoers in the City at 42nd Street plan, could be spared the indignity of the street. And there was no sign of the Times Tower, which for eighty years had been the pivot around which Times Square rotated. Bedizened with signs, the Times Tower had become an embarrassment, a ludicrous street person of a building. As Klein says, “Rockefeller Center had a skating rink with a tree as the center. Here was a building with signs all over it. What statement did that make?” Johnson planned to substitute a fountain with a laser light show. He had, all in all, created precisely the image for Times Square that George Klein had craved.
In recent years Johnson had enjoyed, at worst, an equivocal reputation among architecture critics; the Chippendale Building had been praised as lavishly as it had been mocked. But when the critics saw Times Square Center, they came down on him like a ton of bricks. The Times’s Ada Louise Huxtable, a qualified fan in years past, derided the proposal as “enormous pop-up buildings with fancy hats.” The New Yorker’s Brendan Gill described the structures as “great gray ghosts of buildings, shutting out the sun and turning Times Square into the bottom of a well.” Critics in both the popular and the professional media lamented the massiveness, dullness, homogeneity, and overwhelming corporateness of the proposed buildings; only Paul Goldberger suggested that “they could cut a sharp and lively profile on the skyline,” though he added that “it is difficult not to be concerned” by their bulk. And the idea of demolishing the Times Tower provoked an additional bout of horror.
What had happened? Had public tastes changed while Philip Johnson was sketching out his granite cliffs? This is the view of Paul Travis, who as vice president of the city’s Public Development Corporation played a major role in implementing the project. “Johnson’s view,” Travis explains, “was that historically Times Square had these sober buildings, like the Paramount Building, along the avenues, and that’s what he was trying to create. What he missed was that everyone’s view about what Times